Daytime Moon

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 9 Minutes

A crescent moon stamped the night sky warily, now more obvious in the dark than it had been earlier in the day when it was just an opal sliver on a pale blue sheet. He repositioned his legs in his sleeping bag. The moon looked like a grin, but not a true one; it was the fake smile of a cartoon villain or a teacher who was at a breaking point. 

He rolled to his side, turning his back on the moon. He was not interested in its company tonight. Instead, he stared into the dark forest, willing it to come, the thing he was waiting for, so he could take his mind off of the moon lurking behind him. He reached under his pillow and felt the cold metal of his flashlight, and, next to it, his gun. 

If it came tonight, he would be ready.

There were reasons he went into the woods alone. He didn’t want to explain his preference for the dark trees over the unblinking moon. They were deeper, he might say, and could hold anything, unlike the moon—a beautiful hunk of rock, soulless like a plaster statue outside the doors of a hotel that was losing money. 

The forest promised everything the moon could not. Potential, danger, the unknown. From here, the moon was no threat. To be on the moon, the biggest danger was quite literally nothing. To be there alone meant to be there with nothing—no air, no breath, no life. At least the woods gave a chance of survival. Yes, there was a risk of death but also the chance for a prolonged life compared to clinging to the distant crescent that looked down on him now. 

Looking down on us. That phrase was a comfort that his mother would toss toward him. The moon is looking down on us. “But what good?” he thought when he was old enough to hear the words clearly. To look down on us and do nothing? Or to look down on us as the wealthy look down on the poor, like a dilapidated building, better burned down to get rid of the eyesore than to be seen as the home of someone poor, stamped with years of padding the stairs in socked feet and opening cupboards in the kitchen looking for snacks that the rich wouldn’t want to eat anyway.

The woods reached their quiet point. After the ruckus of bedtime, they always settled down with him. An occasional noise rose above the rest—an owl’s screech, a lonely cicada’s hum, the smooth slide of his own breath filling his throat—but mostly they were quiet.

The forest slept around him, and he felt sleep coming for him as well. He shifted and sank a little deeper into his sleeping bag, closer to the cold ground below. He closed his eyes, but his mind still raced around the trees that surrounded him, waiting.

✷

He had always loved the woods, the trees piling up on each other into the distance, making it so you could never see far, like the house of mirrors he ran through at the county fair every summer. Every year, he would get too confident and run straight into a mirror at the end of the maze, leaving a smudge on the glass from his forehead and hands as he stumbled around the last few turns. In the summer when school was let out, he would spend every day in the woods, as a child at the edge where his mom could always see him, then getting deeper and deeper into the darkness as he got older.

One of those summers, just before the county fair started, he woke up in the middle of the night when a shriek sailed in through his cracked bedroom window, pulling him from his sleep. He ran to look.

He had heard animals fighting in the woods before, but never like this. Raccoons would swipe at each other and cackle occasionally. A neighbor’s dog would howl at a prowling fox. But those events did not rattle the bedroom window, making the screen taste bitter as he pressed his face into it, trying to make out the fighting shapes beyond.

At the edge of the woods that night, just visible in the faint moonlight, he saw a tumult of shadows, emitting shrieks so piercing they seemed to fly into his room and scrape across his eardrums. After one final wail, the shadows separated into two, one lying still on the grass, the other circling, legs prancing in the night.

The victor circled wider and wider, finally coming out of the shadow of forest and into the moonlight. He could make out the shape of it through the screen: a pointed nose studded with a diamond of white fur, dark fur with legs tapering into pure white paws, one two three four, staking out its victory in the grass beside the forest.

✷

He woke up suddenly, not sure why he was awake. He was curled up in his sleeping bag like a seahorse washed up on a beach. Then he heard the rooting of a small animal around the edge of the forest. Probably a raccoon. The noises stopped, seeming to pause, hanging in the air, waiting for something to happen before it would continue hunting again.

But instead of resuming its hunt, he heard a thundering crash, a heavy footstep that sounded like it snapped a tree trunk in half.

He grabbed the flashlight and the gun from under his pillow and jumped out of his sleeping bag, onto the grass. Trying to remain calm, he snuck to a nearby fallen tree trunk and slid behind it, waiting to see if the predator would come out of the forest. He waited. Nothing. His breath began to sound loud, rattling in and out of his lungs as he tried to be still.

Then, he heard it again, right next to him, a rustle and a thud, the loud drop of a paw into the dense branches not two yards from his face. He bolted upright and fired a shot. In the flash of his gun, he saw it: a diamond nose that he had seen only once before, that he had been searching for ever since.

A screech floated over to him from the dark spot where he had fired his gun, but a trampling of footsteps told him that the creature he had hit had run away in the dark.

Now, there was nothing. No movement, no rustling, not even the rattle of his own breath. Just the pale moon looking distantly down on him in the grass, as his hands shook in its white light.

✷

The day after he saw the fight from his bedroom window, he ate breakfast and found his mom outside in the yard. She was watering her flowers, little pots and big barrels, dotted with petunias and impatiens and marigolds to keep away the pests. That day, he saw her at the edge of the woods, the green garden hose snaking across the lawn, far from her flower pots.

She was hosing down a patch of grass and turned abruptly to face him as he came up to her.

“Did you hear that fight last night?” He asked. She nodded.

“There was a huge animal out here. I saw it going in circles for a long time, just sniffing and howling.”

He looked at where his mom was watering. She usually didn’t hose the grass, especially not since they’d had so much rain this summer. They were standing where the fight had been, now a sleek wet patch from the water. The last traces of something red slipped off the green blades of grass and into the soil below.

“Was that blood?” He asked.

His mom turned to look at him. “Honey, I need to tell you something. Franny didn’t come home last night.”

Franny, their outdoor cat, had lived with them since before he was born. She scouted out corners of their house and came and went through a patch of screen cut out of the back door, covered with a flap of plaid fabric, bringing back mice and dead birds from her adventures.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

His mom shut her eyes for a long time, not moving the hose.

“Mom,” he said again, “Where did she go?” His voice rose as he watched his mom reposition the hose between her hands.

“I think she’s gone, sweetheart.”

His mother clicked off the hose and began walking back toward the house.

He looked back at the patch of lawn, picturing the shadow that had stayed there unmoving the night before. Now that patch was a flood of water, every blade soaked and drowning.

✷

He did not sleep the rest of the night. Before dawn, while it was still dark, he pulled himself out of the sleeping bag, packed up his supplies, and looked for the path that had been started by his gunshot the night before. The injured animal had fled through the woods, its blood trailing behind. He followed it over the rotted logs and fallen leaves, holding his gun tight and ready. He went deeper and deeper into the dark woods, following the slick red spots. When the sun crept into the sky overhead, his eyes were fixed on the ground, and he did not notice the sun’s help as he searched for the path forward.

Then the blood stopped, but the injury started to slow the creature down. Branches were broken, telltale bends and breaks in underbrush that should have been impenetrably smooth.

He followed the small destructions until he reached a bank in the forest, a row of trees propped up on a small bluff with a narrow opening to a cave below it.

This must be it, he thought, the place where it lives.

Before Franny went missing, he had loved the woods because of the possibilities. From the Hundred Acre Wood to Sherwood Forest, the woods had always been the start of his adventures. After Franny, they became more than that. They were ten thousand leagues under the sea, Shelob’s lair. An adventure, but also a threat.

He paced outside of the cave. He wouldn’t go in; he couldn’t go in. Even with his flashlight and his gun, it wasn’t smart. The cave could crumble and break, or he could get lost and trapped. All of his love for the woods stopped at the entrance to this cave. This wasn’t another great adventure. It was a yawning mouth looking to swallow him whole, a death of absence, like Franny, never seen again, a thick digestion as he was slowly taken back into the ground.

No, he would remain here, outside of the cave. He knew that the creature was in there, and he would either wait it out or force it to show itself. He sat and stared at the entrance. The sun rose higher in the sky, a shrill light that came through the forest leaves in patches, a spotlight sweeping across him from time to time. This might be his only chance. Above, the slice of moon reappeared between the trees, trapping him between the unknown nothing of a distant rock, and the unknown everything of the dark cave.

He took aim and sent one shot into the hole.

It was stupid, reckless. His mom would be mad if she knew he was using his gun like that. He hoped to hear a yelp of pain, bracing himself to hear the screech again. But there was nothing, just a boy spending hours fuming at a cave.

He crept closer to the entrance and peered in. From here, he could see patches of light coming through the top of the cave. The roof was thin, just a layer of rooted soil between the cavern and the trees. As he watched, a piece crumbled and fell to the floor below.

Then he saw what he needed to do.

Climbing on top of the bluff, he stomped down with his feet. One after another, waiting for the soil to break, for the cracks he had seen to show themselves and crumble away. After a few stomps, he found it, the soft ground.

He jumped, letting it crumble, and the ground began to cave in. He stomped again and again. Then, just before the cave could collapse completely, he heard a furrowing at the entrance and saw it: a diamond nose, black fur.

The creature sprang out of the cave and ran into the trees. He raised his gun and shot.

He knew he had won even before the shot hit the creature. It bounded away, but he caught up to it just as it reached a clearing in the forest, a wide stage of sun shining on a patch devoid of trees. The creature sagged to a stop as he approached.

He shot it one last time, a mercy shot, an apology for not finishing the job two shots earlier. The creature looked at him finally, and he watched it go from something to nothing, from a bounding animal to a stuffed statue, remains that would rot or be eaten, that would never run from him or rustle the bushes again.

He sank down to the ground, leaning back against a tree as the creature sagged with its last breath. The clearing was beautiful, swaying daisies nodding their white heads along with the wind, lone butterflies scouting for lost friends, a bird eating berries off a bush nearby. But he could feel death in the creature before him, a blank movie screen in between showings, a painting so close to lifelike but missing a buzzing heart. Overhead, the daytime moon had reappeared, a little wider, a tiny bit closer to whole, just a white nick in the azure sky, still cold and distant, still casting off a light that wasn’t its own.

✷

Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Bashaer

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